SimCity Offline Mode Achieved By Hacker

EA, sit down and shut up for a second. Don't release any more press releases or send your cronies to comment sections to defend the company. Just sit down...and shut up. You're about to get the smackdown laid down upon thee by none other than the gaming community itself, as a hacker has gone and electrified the gaming world by proving that EA lied about SimCity not being able to run in offline mode. Not only did the hacker achieve a great feat, he put it on YouTube for added proof.

I'd love to know what COO Peter Moore and CEO John Ricitiello have to say about being in the crosshairs of blatant misrepresentation of a product that was designed to be broken out of the box with always-on DRM, even though proof has surfaced indicating that it very well can be played alone, offline.

Blues News picked up the story thanks to Videogamer, and in the post on YouTube, the modder/hacker notes that...

So with a little bit of package editing within SimCity, and a little playing about in the code, it's possible to enable debug mode.

This shows that highway editing will be easily possible, AND that editing outside of the artificially small city boundaries should be very viable too.

Other things I have modded out with a quick change: Unlimited time to remain disconnected (won't get booted at 20 minutes, can now be disconnected "forever"). Population count now shows REAL figure, not the "artificially inflated" figure. My large cities have a population of about 15k now, not 100k :P

So you're probably curious to see the debugged SimCity in action with this chap showing off something that we reported on earlier with EA saying that playing offline would not be possible. In fact, let me post up the exact quote so in case some shill spills some bile in our comment section...

The game was designed for MP, we sim the entire region on the server so this is just not possible

Hold on...let me repeat that so it burns in and your inner hatred for Electronic Arts can fester into a brimming storm of protest that sees you burning your money rather than spending it on another EA product...

The game was designed for MP, we sim the entire region on the server so this is just not possible

And lo and behold, the video below showcases some of the debugged content from the hacker playing outside the designated region. That's right, you don't have to build tiny little cities either. The biggest complaints about the game can actually be fixed if gamers spread the word enough that EA lied about SimCity. The hacker's info coincides nicely with the recent admission by a Maxis' engineer who said that what you're about to see in the video below was doable and possible with minimal effort.

The only way EA can rectify this is if they can somehow prove that the video above is fake or sue the modder so that he doesn't make it viable for other people to replicate. Good luck trying to save your already six-feet under reputation EA...good luck.